VBT# Review - The Woman In My Home - D.L Fisher - October 2026 The Woman In My Home opens with a moment I’m sure many of us would recognise: a message lights up on her husband’s phone, and she reads it. Of course she does, who wouldn’t? She’s turning thirty in two weeks and thinks she’s about to be surprised with a birthday gift, so she’s thrilled to learn he’s bought them their dream log cabin in the Poconos, tucked beside a private lake. But when she drives out to see it while he’s supposedly away on a work trip, his truck is already there. And so is another woman. What a hook! The double life storyline is one of my all-time favourite themes, and I’m always on the lookout for a new take on it. What makes this one different is that the woman he truly loves is the one who doesn’t have his children. Usually it’s the other way round, with the other woman as the secret, and the family at home. DL Fisher turns that on its head, and it made me look at every character in a completely new li...

Synopsis: The Last Time I Saw Her - Rhiannon Bardsley - October 2026 The stranger appeared in her dreams. Now she’s invading her life. Sage has a recurring nightmare: a woman she doesn’t know is drowning, fighting desperately as the dark water closes over her. It’s unsettling, but Sage shrugs it off when she wakes. Until she sees the same woman in a South London supermarket. Her name is Lara, she is a psychology student and small-time influencer. And Sage is certain—she is about to die. Sage feels she has to do everything she can to save Lara, and slowly, quietly, she begins to infiltrate her life—following her online, engineering a chance encounter, earning her trust. When Lara confides she's being stalked, Sage knows she’s right—the nightmare is coming true. But what can Sage actually do? She can’t tell Lara she was appearing in her dreams before they ever met—that would sound insane. All she can do is watch over her, try to protect her. Then, as she gets ever closer to Lara, Sag...

VBT# Good Twin, Bad Twin - Renita D'Silva - October 2026 I’ll admit it straight away: I have a soft spot for stories about twins. There’s something endlessly fascinating about two people who start out so alike and end up so different, and Good Twin, Bad Twin gave me plenty to chew on. It opens with a chilling hook. A postcard arrives bearing a pretty Cotswold village and a nickname only one person ever used, a person who, by rights, shouldn’t be able to send it. If she’s alive, then whose body is buried under the patio? I was hooked by the end of the first chapter. Our narrator was the shy, bookish twin, forever living in the shadow of her golden sister. Now she has what she always wanted: a stunning home on the Dorset cliffs, a handsome husband and a beautiful teenage daughter. But her husband vanishes at night, and the family dog seems to be the only one who truly loves her. Cosy it is not, and I loved every unsettling minute. This is very much an unreliable narrator story, and...

Review: Finders Keepers - Jessica Huntley - September 2026 Some books have you reaching for a cuppa and settling into the couch. This one had me reaching for a cuppa and glancing nervously at the door. Finders Keepers opens with Mel, Liv and Jennie, three lifelong friends who would do anything for each other. When Mel's mum passes away, a hidden key leads them to a storage unit. Inside they find more than £100,000 in cash, and a body. And because the girls are in desperate need of money, they make a decision that will haunt them: keep the cash, say nothing. Reading that opening, I couldn't help thinking of the true New Zealand case from a few years back, when an Auckland family bought an old storage shed at auction, opened it up, and found two suitcases with human remains inside. They stumbled on a fortune too, and they've been paying the price ever since. It gave me a proper shiver. Real life, it turns out, can be every bit as unsettling as fiction, and it made Jessica H...

VBT# The Home Swap - A.A Chaudhuri - September 2026 There's something delightfully unsettling about curling up on your own sofa, tea in hand, reading a thriller about a house swap gone catastrophically wrong. I'll admit, I've had the same daydream as everyone else,  swapping keys with a lovely couple in Cornwall or the Cotswolds, waking up somewhere new, pretending for a week that our lives are a little more glamorous than they are. And then, being the thriller addict I am, that fantasy always curdles into the same nagging thought: but what if they're weird? What if they go through my drawers? A.A. Chaudhuri clearly had the exact same intrusive thought, except she actually did something with it  she wrote this brilliantly twisty, deliciously paranoid book. The setup pulled me in immediately. A couple, marking their tenth wedding anniversary, swap homes for a week  partly for a change of scenery, partly to paper over cracks in a marriage already strained by something ou...

Review: The Man in the Photo - McGarvey Black - September 2026 There's a particular kind of book that gets under my skin before I've even turned the first page, and it's this one: stories about people living double lives, walking away from everything they knew, and building someone new out of the wreckage. I don't know what it is about reinvention that fascinates me so much ,  maybe it's the fantasy of a clean slate, maybe it's the horror of realizing you never really knew someone at all  but The Man in the Photo delivers that obsession in spades. The setup alone had me settled into my reading chair with a cup of tea, utterly hooked. Our narrator is doing something so ordinary, so achingly relatable  scrolling through her daughter's holiday photos from Australia  when the ground shifts beneath her. There, in the background of a stranger's snapshot: a blue shirt, a gray beard, a face she buried over twenty years ago. Her fiancé. The father of her child....

  VBT# Review: Echo - Christine Lydon - August 2026 There is something about a book set in a secluded location that instantly pulls me in, and Echo by Christine Lydon had my attention from the moment I read the premise. A writer escaping to a remote retreat in the Vermont mountains to finish her overdue novel? Add in a vast Gothic house, a mysterious history, power cuts, no phone signal, and a hedge maze where you could literally lose yourself, and honestly, I was ready to check into Hemlock House myself , although perhaps not for quite as long as the main character! Our main female character Ally arrives at Hemlock House carrying more than just writer's block. Six months earlier, she lost her son Justin , her marriage to Henry has fallen apart, and her career is beginning to unravel as her book deadline passes her by. She has come to this isolated retreat hoping to disappear for a while and, hopefully, find her way back to writing again. But Hemlock House has other ideas. Every ...

Review: My Twin Sister - Alesha Dykema - August 2026 There are some thriller tropes that I just can’t resist, and long-lost family members, missing people and someone coming back from the dead are definitely high on my list. So when I picked up My Twin Sister by Alesha Dykema, I was immediately intrigued. Because how would you react if the twin sister you believed had died eighteen years ago suddenly walked into your father’s funeral? That is exactly what happens to Gen. Grace was supposed to have drowned when the sisters were just nineteen. Gen has spent nearly two decades believing that her twin is gone, so seeing Grace standing there, alive and well, is understandably a huge shock. But the surprises don’t stop there. Grace reveals that she suffered from amnesia and has only just remembered who she really is. Except Gen doesn’t believe her. And there’s a very good reason for that. Grace was once in love with Gen’s husband, Wyatt. Suddenly, Gen is living the life that Grace once dream...

#VBT - Review: You'll Be Sorry - Liz Alterman - August 2026 Pour yourself something cold, pull up a chair, because I need to talk to you about this one. I picked up You'll Be Sorry the way I pick up most revenge stories with a little thrill in my stomach and a promise to myself that I'd only read "just one chapter" before bed. We all know how that promise usually goes. Amelia Montgomery is turning forty, and instead of candles and cake on her mind, she's flipping through a magazine when Ethan Blackmore 's face stops her cold. Ethan:  the man who broke her, humiliated her, and then had the audacity to build a whole shiny new life while she picked up the pieces of the old one. You know the type. Maybe you've even had your own Ethan. I loved the idea of Amelia. A woman who clawed her way back from heartbreak and built something real,  a business, a self, a whole second life is exactly the kind of protagonist I want to root for at my kitchen tabl...